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Ask HN: I got laid off and I want to showcase my skills, any suggestion?

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Re: Ask HN: I got laid off and I want to showcase my skills, any suggestion?

#21

Post by llmblockchain »

maury91 wrote: post #19
llmblockchain wrote: post #11

First and foremost, fuck Github. It doesn't define who you are and what you are capable of. Don't buy into it. For reference, my Github is set to private and has a single repository pointing people to my personal site. My personal site has 8 sentences on it. It says who I am and what I've built (software products). I don't blog. I don't share code. What you need is to be able to demonstrate what you are capable of. I…

I do agree that job postings asking for personal projects are a little bit over the top. The main problem with building products is the idea, the spark, honestly I can't see at the moment a product that people need, or even less, a product that I would need

Ideas are easy. You don't need to think of a new idea (in fact, I highly suggest not doing that). Instead, pick an idea that has been done to death and do it again.

Make a cronjob monitoring service. Make a "privacy focused analytics" platform. Make a session replay service. Make a "javascript error collection" service. Make a user feedback widget as a service.

It doesn't matter what you make. Pick something that has been done before and do it on your own.

If you are hell bent on live streaming-- live streaming that would be far more interesting than watching someone rebuild react.

Re: Ask HN: I got laid off and I want to showcase my skills, any suggestion?

#22

Post by ilrwbwrkhv »

Hiring managers are usually dumb.

Interviews at most tech companies are broken.

They are run by developers who are usually poor communicators which means they cannot tell you what they are looking for etc.

What you are trying to do will not help you at all.

At 11 years of experience if you are not getting direct invitations to join teams without interviews you have done the biggest mistake so far: you haven't created a network.

Your goal should be very simple. Make a list of director of engineering from top companies, see if they have a GitHub, check if they have a open source project and then contribute to that.

All you need in your GitHub is a hyped up version of your skills.

Do not do interviews, that is key.

Re: Ask HN: I got laid off and I want to showcase my skills, any suggestion?

#23

Post by _mlbt »

maury91 wrote: post #19
llmblockchain wrote: post #11

First and foremost, fuck Github. It doesn't define who you are and what you are capable of. Don't buy into it. For reference, my Github is set to private and has a single repository pointing people to my personal site. My personal site has 8 sentences on it. It says who I am and what I've built (software products). I don't blog. I don't share code. What you need is to be able to demonstrate what you are capable of. I…

I do agree that job postings asking for personal projects are a little bit over the top. The main problem with building products is the idea, the spark, honestly I can't see at the moment a product that people need, or even less, a product that I would need

I don't worry about what other people need. I build for what I need and if it's not too much effort I also make it available to everyone just in case it's useful to them. A couple examples:

I got tired of configuring emacs by hand for use with Erlang. I had lookup the specific incantation that needed to go into the configuration file every single time. Yes, it only takes a couple minutes and it's not something I do often, but now it's just a simple script away.

https://github.com/dlachausse/erlmacs

Another example: like a lot of people I anxiously wait for certain days to come or need a reminder of just how close we are getting to certain holidays and family birthdays. So I built a quick and dirty app in SwiftUI to countdown the days until a specified date. (It's free with no ads or IAPs, since I built it for my own needs and don't care to monetize it.)

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/countdownula/id6479545149

Re: Ask HN: I got laid off and I want to showcase my skills, any suggestion?

#25

Post by maury91 »

gsuuon wrote: post #24

This sounds like an interesting series, I'd watch it. If you do go for livestreaming, keep in mind a big part of that is interacting with chat. If that's not something you're into then maybe recorded content with light editing might be better.

Yes, I plan to interact with the public. I got the idea of a live streaming during a coding interview, I believe they would feel similar

Re: Ask HN: I got laid off and I want to showcase my skills, any suggestion?

#26

Post by winterplace »

ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #22

Hiring managers are usually dumb. Interviews at most tech companies are broken. They are run by developers who are usually poor communicators which means they cannot tell you what they are looking for etc. What you are trying to do will not help you at all. At 11 years of experience if you are not getting direct invitations to join teams without interviews you have done the biggest mistake so far: you haven't created…

Good advice for the guy

What do you think are the causes for the first three things you wrote about?

Do you have an email address or a contact method?

Re: Ask HN: I got laid off and I want to showcase my skills, any suggestion?

#27

Post by ilrwbwrkhv »

winterplace wrote: post #26
ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #22

Hiring managers are usually dumb. Interviews at most tech companies are broken. They are run by developers who are usually poor communicators which means they cannot tell you what they are looking for etc. What you are trying to do will not help you at all. At 11 years of experience if you are not getting direct invitations to join teams without interviews you have done the biggest mistake so far: you haven't created…

Good advice for the guy What do you think are the causes for the first three things you wrote about? Do you have an email address or a contact method?

Interviews are broken because companies are cargo cults. What Google did yesterday, Stripe will do today.

It's because to find true signals of a senior engineer needs longer than 35 mins spent on a problem and you need to pair that with a developer who is trained in the art of interviewing so that they can extract the biggest things one needs to test: overall architectural principles, thinking through things, how one protects their code from mistakes etc.

But companies are not willing to spend time doing this because HR is basically not trained even today to deal with real technical thinking.

Unless there are a bunch of devs moving into HR, things will not get better.

Companies don't care that much either. Most companies pretend they need much more talent than they actually require.

Re: Ask HN: I got laid off and I want to showcase my skills, any suggestion?

#28

Post by mmarian »

maury91 wrote: post #15
ipaddr wrote: post #14

Use your extra time to apply to more places the roi is higher. Get feedback from interviews than focus on those areas. What you think you need might be different than what the market thinks

Unfortunately I already applied to literally all of them

How many jobs have you applied so far to? Have you done everything you could when it comes to applying to those jobs? (eg virtual coffees with potential colleagues, contacting the hiring manager, etc)

Re: Ask HN: I got laid off and I want to showcase my skills, any suggestion?

#29

Post by tripleo1 »

llmblockchain wrote: post #12
maury91 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand your point of view about polishing, and from the other comments too it is a common theme. I believe polishing will be needed, but that doesn't exclude the creation of also unpolished worked. From all the feedback gathered I will: 1. Live stream the unpolished work, this will help creating a sense of community and people would be able to be part of the short feedback loop 2. Collect the most interesting p…

The audience for such content is incredibly tiny, and those that watch it are not hiring people. People have incredibly short attention spans these days. If your video isn't 20 second shorts with large text and jump cuts you will lose the viewer. Video is a terrible medium in general. You're not Tsoding/T3/Primeagen and you're better off spending your time elsewhere. Note-- their audiences are primarily young junior…

Along these lines I was thinking why in the world would you be making videos for recruiters?

And (not criticism) why is how React works a showcase of your skill?

Re: Ask HN: I got laid off and I want to showcase my skills, any suggestion?

#30

Post by ipaddr »

maury91 wrote: post #15
ipaddr wrote: post #14

Use your extra time to apply to more places the roi is higher. Get feedback from interviews than focus on those areas. What you think you need might be different than what the market thinks

Unfortunately I already applied to literally all of them

Have you tried cold applying?
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